New MetaPoint CMS Skin Designs and Implementation

July 5th, 2009 - After a long hiatus focusing our company on the direction of the MetaPoint CMS, and seeing the successful release of version 7.0, our company re-focused on design, implementation, and customer service of the areas we do best, designing and implementing Portal Skins for our customers.

Today we finalized the details and implementation of two skins, the Louisiana Department of Education Senior Project Network, and the re-design of one of our oldest clients, iCADsales.com.

This ecommerce CAD software distributor had been using a skin we built for them back in 2005 and had built their company to over 1/2 million dollars a year in sales. iCADsales decided the original skin needed some updates to keep up with the web 2.0 era so they decided to come back to the home they knew and trusted, Portland Portals.

Working with them to define and pin down their design was a challenge as they had no idea what they were looking for, just giving us key indicators such as less cluttered, easier to navigate, fresh and clean. We took the ball and ran with it offering several new gadgets they fell in love with. The site sports use of a large header with shadows giving the site a 3D look, combined with flyover buttons on the subpages to alert users to their important. A garage door main links area enclosed in a 3D box design provides action to the visitor as their mouse slides over the buttons causing a door to open and a descriptive icon to appear. This was a design that was quite intensive to create using all the tricks of CSS and HTML, with very little JavaScript throw in, that we had in our arsenal. But along the way we learned a whole lot more that we can use on our future skin design jobs!

The Louisiana Senior Project Network was also done for a client who has been with us for a while. It is always a good feeling when customers decide to return for design work. It validates the effort you put in and tells you that you are doing at least some things right. The design we originally started working on was not even presented to the customer. One of our designers had to begin without the help of our Art Director who had taken some time off to work on some of her own projects but when she saw the design all she could say was "oh no... no no". Luckily we were not far into the project so little time was wasted when we scraped that design in favor of another. The design was particularly tricky to pin down as we were working with colors that do not lend well to a pleasing outcome. If you have ever heard the song from the rock band Bad Company that goes "Give me Silver, Blue and Gold, the color of the sky I'm told..." you get the idea. Gold is not a color for large areas of screen real-estate but our team put together something that would not irritate the soul while ensuring that the design was well blended and fit together.

Another interesting item to note about the LA SPN project was the rewriting of the MetaPoint templates from table based layouts to a layout entirely dependent on using CSS to accomplish the design. Our work will become a part of the next release of MetaPoint changing the entire product into an updated standards friendly CMS. Not that the Portal System doesn't support standards now, it is just that the various layouts you can apply to a page are all dependent on Tables to position each column. And adding rows other than the header and footer? Impossible to align them with each other.

So it's back to work for the team on the next round of designs and creative work that we love. If you are considering creating either a new design for an existing website, or creating a brand new website, you really should ring us up and discuss what the combination of the MetaPoint CMS and our skin design team can do for your business.